Drupal

Drupal on Windows: Using Windows Authentication with SQL Server

With the release of Drupal 7, it became easy to run the whole Drupal stack on Windows technologies. Instead of requiring a LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP), you now have the option of a WISP stack (Windows, IIS, SQL Server, PHP). The excellent Drupal 7 driver for SQL server makes using a SQL Server backend with Drupal possible. Even better, the underlying PDO (PHP Data Objects) driver for SQL Server supports Windows authentication! But wait… there are no instructions provided on using Windows authentication to SQL Server with Drupal! I knew that in theory it should be possible. After some tweaking, I finally figured it out. So how do you set it up? Here are the missing instructions…

Getting Windows Authentication working with SQL Server

Before you start, you will need either:

  • A domain user account, with both web server and SQL server joined to the domain
    -or-
  • Identical user accounts on both servers (same username and password); in this case the servers do not need to be joined to a domain

In my example below, I will use the identical user accounts method. Omit step 1 and substitute your domain account information wherever step 1 is referenced if you want to use the domain account method. Continue reading Drupal on Windows: Using Windows Authentication with SQL Server →

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Events, SharePoint

Cloudy with a Chance of SharePoint

There’s been a lot of talk, recently and not so recently, about SharePoint in the cloud, especially with the release of Office 365. Hell, there’s been a lot of talk about cloudification, period (though perhaps not using that particular term). Cloud computing provider CloudShare just finalized a$10 million round of vc funding, Apple is letting users store and stream backups of their iTunes downloads in the iCloud, Google Docs now has pivot tables…From financial and ease-of-use standpoints, it’s easy to see why moving data to the cloud is such an appealing proposition. From a security standpoint, as we witnessed with the Amazon/Playstation hack this year, it’s rather less appealing. And then there’s the current lack of feature paritybetween SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint Online, and the fact that the latter doesn’t support farm-scoped solutions, full-trust solutions or WebApplication-scoped features. Continue reading Cloudy with a Chance of SharePoint →

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STEM

STEM and the Third Culture: A Case for Interdisciplinary Education

America is having a STEM crisis, I hear. There is great need for engineers and a dearth of qualified applicants, forcing employers to outsource, ramp up international recruitment or move.  On the 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), the US ranked 25th in math and 17th in science. A recent OECD study with Stanford University projected that a boost in PISA scores could translate to economic gains in the tens of trillions of dollars over the span of the students’ lifetime. But right now, these students are building sugar cube castles while their Asian, German and Scandinavian counterparts are using Lattice QCD to calculate the properties of hadrons. A year before the PISA rankings came out, President Obama announced that America needed more hadrons and less sugar. His “Educate to Innovate” campaign is pumping $260 million into STEM teaching programs and his Race to the Top fund provides financial incentives to states that commit to improving their STEM education efforts. Continue reading STEM and the Third Culture: A Case for Interdisciplinary Education →

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Programming

Robert Morris, Encryption and the Pony Express

[Image via NexGadet.com]

Robert Morris Sr. died June 26, 2011. I had the honor of meeting Mr. Morris in 1996 at a Dartmouth Workshop, where he gave an interesting and dynamic talk on transportable agents. He then took questions from the attendees. In my ignorance, I asked him:

“Aren’t you worried that the vast majority of common encryption schemes (SSL, RSA, etc) are based on prime factors of large numbers? If someone found an algorithm for this wouldn’t all common encryption be useless?”

Little did I realize that speculation has been rife for a long time that the NSA had in fact solved this long ago, either by math or vast amounts of hardware or a combination of both. As the former Chief Scientist of the NSA, Morris had obviously been asked the question before by people much smarter and with much more at stake than me. He could have easily brushed it off. Instead, with the infinite patience of parent, he carefully chose his answer. Continue reading Robert Morris, Encryption and the Pony Express →

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IT

The Poor Man’s Client-Side Authentication

Recently I had to whip up a quick Web page to disseminate some information requiring a semblance of security in the form of a user name and password. Furthermore, I had HTML and Javascript but no server-side scripting at my immediate disposal. What I came up with as a solution was this.

  • Create a form for entering user name and password. This doesn’t have to be any more complicated than two input fields:
<label>User name:</label>
<input type='text" id='username" />
<label>Password:</label>
<input type='password" id='password" />
  • Add a button to submit the form:
<input id="btnSubmit" type="button" value="Submit" onclick="javascript:go()" />

Continue reading The Poor Man’s Client-Side Authentication →

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Excel, OfficeWriter, SharePoint

How to Create a Renewal Forecast Report with CRM, ExcelWriter and SharePoint

After finishing off our ASP.NET, SQL, and ExcelWriter training, the Technical Services Interns were given a project to create a proof of concept involving the dynamic generation of internal reports. We would use our new SQL knowledge to pull data from a customer relations database (Microsoft CRM), our ExcelWriter knowledge to create a rich Excel report from that data, and our ASP.NET skills to create a Web Form whereby users could constrain the reports they received. The reports would then be ported into SharePoint webparts. The reports were split into three categories:

  • Renewal Forecast
  • Case Distribution
  • Customer Activity

This post addresses the first of these reports. The Renewal Forecast report gives a company’s Sales and Support departments insight into customer contracts coming up for renewal.

Creating the Renewal Forecast Report

The purpose of this report is to provide a detailed overview of customers’ support contracts that are nearing expiration so employees can better manage the renewal process. The front-end in SharePoint is customizable so the report is generated completely dynamically and populated using queries from CRM. It is all ASP.NET code and uses a very sharp looking jQuery datepicker. Of course, the report generation is handled nicely using an ExcelWriter template. Not a current ExcelWriter user? No problem: you can download a free evaluation and follow along! Continue reading How to Create a Renewal Forecast Report with CRM, ExcelWriter and SharePoint →

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Knowledge Base, WordWriter

How to get a list of bookmarks from a Word document

Problem

You want to get a list of all the bookmarks in a document using WordWriter.

Solution

WordTemplate

The WordTemplate.Boomarks will return the names of all the bookmarks in a WordWriter template. This can be useful for binding data to the template with SetRepeatBlock, which requires the name of the bookmark for the repeatblock.

WordApplication

Use the GetElements method to retrieve all the elements of a particular type. In this case, the Element.Type is “Bookmark”.

For example, to retreive an array of all the bookmarks in a document:

Element[] eArray = document.GetElements(Element.Type.Bookmark);
//Get a handle on the first bookmark in the document
Bookmark bookmrk = (Bookmark)eArray[0];
If you need to retrieve a particular bookmark, use Document.GetBookmark(string), which returns the Bookmark object with the specified name.

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ExcelWriter, Knowledge Base, OfficeWriter, WordWriter

Unexpected behavior of the CONTINUE modifier in version 7.1 and below

Problem

Using the CONTINUE modifier in a template to generate a report may show an unexpected behavior. Breaking down the different scenarios, we find that the behavior changes with data source type and amount of data available.

As described in our documentation, the Continue modifier enables data from a single data source to span multiple worksheets using the ExcelTemplate object. Without the modifier, if the data source for the ExcelTemplate uses a forward-only cursor, such as with a DataReader, the second worksheet with the same data marker will automatically start from the next row of data. If the data source is scrollable, however, the second worksheet with the same data marker will rewind to the first row of data. The Continue modifier tells the ExcelTemplate object to start from the next row even if the data source is scrollable. More about data markers and modifiers here.

In version 7.1 and below, the above description is accurate if there is enough data to reach the last data marker with a continue modifier before the data source has exhausted. However, if the data source gets exhausted prior to that point, the ExcelTemplate object will try to rewind the data source which may result in an exception thrown (for forward-only data sources) or duplication of data (for scrollable data sources).

Here are the two specific cases:

  1. When using a forward-only data source, the ExcelTemplate object will throw a runtime exception on the Process method: “Exhausted Data Markers” because it has encountered a new data marker but there is no more data available.
  2. When using a scrollable data source, the ExcelTemplate object will rewind the data source and will result in duplicated data on both worksheets.

Solution

Option 1: Upgrade to ExcelWriter 7.5 or later (recommended)

This issue was fixed in version 7.5 by applying more reasonable behaviors to the edge cases. With the new behavior, if the data has exhausted before reaching all data markers with a CONTINUE modifier, ExcelTemplate will not attempt to rewind the data source and will simply remove the extra data markers (similar to the behavior of the “optional” modifier).

Here is a table comparing the old and new behaviors in all scenarios:

No modifiers (CONTINUE) (OPTIONAL) (CONTINUE,OPTIONAL)
Old New Old New Old New Old New
Forward-only data source that still has data Continue Continue Continue Continue Continue Continue Continue Continue
Forward-only data source with exhausted data Exception Exception Exception Empty Exception Empty Exception Empty
Scrollable data source with that still has data Rewind Rewind Continue Continue Rewind Rewind Continue Continue
Scrollable data source with exhausted data Rewind Rewind Rewind Empty Rewind Rewind Rewind Empty

Option 2: Divide the data

If the template file cannot be modified at runtime, divide the data according to the number of sheets containing data markers with the CONTINUE modifier. This can be done by adjusting the MaxRows setting so there will be data available to the last of these data markers.

Option 3: Use ExcelApplication

Alternatively, if we have the ExcelApplication object available (included in OfficeWriter Enterprise Edition) we can modify the template to contain the correct number of sheets in the workbook. This way we can keep MaxRows a constant. It is possible to pass a template document between the application object and the template object in memory.

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ExcelWriter, Knowledge Base, OfficeWriter, WordWriter

Error: General license key exception: No valid license key found

Problem

When trying to create an instance of the ExcelApplication or ExcelTemplate objects, the following error is returned:

General license key exception: No valid license key found.

This can happen if you are trying to use an OfficeWriter dll that is not the same version as the license key in the registry.

A common scenario where this occurs, is upgrading to a new version of OfficeWriter. When the old version of OfficeWriter is uninstalled and a new version is installed, the dlls in your projects are not automatically updated. This means that your projects may have references to the old dlls (say v4), but the license key in the registry is for the new version (v8).

Update April 4, 2013: If you are running a 32-bit application with OfficeWriter on a 64-bit operating system, you may encounter this error message, even though the license key is in the registry and matches the version of OfficeWriter being used. If you experience this issue, please contact us.

Solution

There are 2 options:

  1. Update the references in your projects to point to the new OfficeWriter dlls. (Dlls can be found under Program Files\SoftArtisans\OfficeWriter\bin).
  2. Add the license key for the old version with the License Key Manager to run both versions of OfficeWriter. For more information about running different versions of OfficeWriter side-by-side, refer to this post.

To add a license key with the License Key Manager:

  1. Locate LicenseManager.exe either from Start > Programs > SoftArtisans > OfficeWriter or from Program Files\SoftArtisans\OfficeWriter.
  2. If you are installing on Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008, right click LicenseManager.exe and select ‘Run as Administrator’. Otherwise, double-click to run the installer.
  3. Click the Add/Update Key button to add the license key.
  4. After the license key is added, you should see license keys for the old and new version registered.
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